In recent years, the internet has grown extremely quickly both in terms of use and the amount of information provided. Information on the internet is typically provided in the form of electronic documents, such as ‘web pages,’ which can present text, pictures, graphics, sounds, video, hyperlinks, and other content to a user. Users are increasingly accessing the internet from devices, other than, or in addition to, desktop computers (e.g., handheld computers, personal digital assistants (PDAs), cell phones, etc.). Many of these devices have display screens with non-traditional dimensions, which differ from dimensions of a traditional pdesktop computer display screen. Because many web pages are developed for presentation on a traditional desktop computer monitor, presentation of such web pages is often less than ideal on these non-traditional display screens.
For example, a desktop computer typically uses a relatively large monitor having a viewable display area greater than 15 inches. A web page developed for such a display screen can include large amounts of information, which are often arranged in a number of rectangular regions called blocks (also called information blocks or content blocks). Each of the blocks may have related data items, which may or may not be selectable by the user.
For example, one block may include a table of contents for a web site, another block may include pictures (e.g., thumbnails), and another block may include a number of selectable hyperlinks, such as news headlines. On a traditional display screen, such large amounts of information may appear almost exactly as the web page creator originally intended. However, on smaller, non-traditional display screens, the rendering process can make the large amounts of information appear very small, unreadable, or otherwise less than ideal.
One possible solution is to write a separate style sheet for every type of device and/or display screen. However, such an approach could be very labor intensive, due to the great variability of some application parameters (such as window sizes and display device sizes). In addition, such an approach would not easily be able to account for advancements and changes in devices and display devices.